CONTENTS OF VOLUME IV
| Preface. The Editor | [7] |
| Sketches of a Tour to the Western Country, through the States of Ohio and Kentucky; a Voyage down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, and a Trip through the Mississippi Territory, and part of West Florida. Commenced at Philadelphia in the Winter of 1807, and concluded in 1809. Fortescue Cuming. | |
| Copyright notice | [18] |
| Author’s Table of Contents | [19] |
| Author’s Preface | [23] |
| Text | [25] |
ILLUSTRATION TO VOLUME IV
| Facsimile of Original Title-page | [17] |
PREFACE TO VOLUME IV
We devote the fourth volume of our series of Western Travels to the reprint of Fortescue Cuming’s Sketches of a Tour to the Western Country—the tour having been made in 1807-1809, the publication itself issuing from a Pittsburg press in 1810.
Of Cuming himself, we have no information save such as is gleaned from his book. He appears to have been an Englishman of culture and refinement, who had travelled extensively in other lands—notably the West Indies, France, Switzerland, and Italy. It is certain that he journeyed to good purpose, with an intelligent, open mind, free from local prejudices, and with trained habits of observation. Cuming was what one may call a good traveller—he endured the inconveniences, annoyances, and vicissitudes of the road, especially in a new and rough country, with equanimity and philosophic patience, deliberately making the best of each day’s happenings, thus proving himself an experienced and agreeable man of the world.
The journeys narrated were taken during two succeeding years. The first, in January, 1807, was a pedestrian tour from Philadelphia to Pittsburg. Arriving in the latter city on the second of February, after twenty-seven days upon the road, the remainder of the winter, the spring, and the early summer were passed at Pittsburg. On the eighteenth of July following, our traveller took boat from Pittsburg, and made his way down the Ohio to the Kentucky entrepôt at Maysville—where he arrived the thirtieth of the month. Mounting a horse, he made a brief trip through Kentucky as far as Lexington and Frankfort, returning to Maysville on the fifth of August. The following day, he crossed the Ohio, and after examining lands in the vicinity, proceeded partly on foot, partly by stage and saddle, over the newly-opened state road of Ohio, through Chillicothe, Lancaster, and Zanesville to Wheeling; thence back to Pittsburg, where he arrived the evening of August 21.
The following year (1808), Cuming begins his narrative at the point on the Ohio where he had left the river the previous year—at Maysville, whence he embarked on the seventh of May for Mississippi Territory. With the same fulness of detail and accurate notation that characterize his former narrative, Cuming describes the voyage down the Ohio and the Mississippi until his arrival at Bayou Pierre on the sixth of June, after a month afloat.
Starting from Bruinsbury, at the mouth of Bayou Pierre, August 22, he took a horseback trip through the settlements of Mississippi Territory lying along the river and some distance inland on its tributaries—Cole’s Creek, St. Catharine’s Bayou, the Homochito, etc.—penetrating the then Spanish territory of West Florida as far as Baton Rouge, and returning by a similar route to Bruinsbury, where he arrived the fifteenth of September.